London Review of Books

Dear Mohamed

Paul Foot, 20 February 1997

Sleaze: The Corruption of Parliament
by David Leigh and Ed Vulliamy.
Fourth Estate, 263 pp., £9.99, January 1997, 1 85702 694 2Show More

“... boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even mentioned John Major as ‘a close friend’. The programme-makers arranged further such meetings, one in a Spanish castle, to which Greer was asked to invite his contacts. Greer’s network of helpful politicians was about to be exposed when Central Television and its new ...”

Strew the path with flowers

Bernard Porter: Cannabis and empire, 4 March 2004

Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade and Prohibition 1800-1928
by James Mills.
Oxford, 239 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 19 924938 5Show More

“... easy way to complete the forms. The same applies to statistics from Egyptian asylums supplied by John Warnock, the head of the Lunacy Department there from 1895 to 1923. Warnock admitted to a ‘total ignorance of Arabic’, which must have made sensitive diagnosis difficult. He also diagnosed Egyptian nationalism as ‘an infectious mental disorder’ and ...”

Even Uglier

Terry Eagleton: Music Hall, 20 December 2012

My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall
by John Major.
Harper, 363 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 00 745013 8Show More

“... of the Union, O’Connell practised as a barrister, the most theatrical of the professions. Tony Blair was also a barrister, his wife is the barrister daughter of an actor, and Blair’s headmaster at Fettes remembered him as a consummate performer. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, was said to have an ‘almost ...”

Crocodile’s Breath

James Meek: The Tale of the Tube, 5 May 2005

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City For Ever
by Christian Wolmar.
Atlantic, 351 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 1 84354 022 3Show More

“... with Thatcher, from 1981 to 1986, as leader of the Greater London Council, and with Blair, from 2000, as mayor – brought to a head a debate about how the system should be run and paid for which had begun in the 1850s, before the first shovelful of earth was dug for the Metropolitan. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras, thanks to the ...”

Vuvuzelas Unite

Andy Beckett: The Trade Union Bill, 22 October 2015

Trade Union Bill (HC Bill 58)
Stationery Office, 32 pp., July 2015Show More

Trade Union Membership 2014: Statistical Bulletin
Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 56 pp., June 2015Show More

“... Labour about to return to power, but still anxious to establish its mainstream credentials, Tony Blair chose to highlight his acceptance of the anti-union consensus in an article for the Times: ‘Let me state the position clearly, so that no one is in any doubt. [Under Labour] the essential elements of the trade union legislation of the 1980s will remain ...”

Blowing over the top of a bottle of San Pellegrino

Adam Mars-Jones: Protest Dance Pop, 15 December 2005

Plat du Jour
by Matthew Herbert.
AccidentalShow More

“... but the sheer coincidence of a Jacobean dramatist and a legendary director sharing the name John Ford. So perhaps it takes a formalist to know one. But the contemporary formalist whose approach converges most sharply on Herbert’s is the sculptor Cornelia Parker. For a piece called Measuring Liberty with a Dollar (1998), for instance, Parker took a ...”

The Departed Spirit

Tom Nairn, 30 October 1997

“... affected to some degree, and looked for an explanation. ‘She called out to the country,’ Elton John sang at the funeral. But may it not have been the English Rose’s country which, in the aftermath of loss, ceased being able to call out in a traditional way? If so, a call long responded to – not really ‘down the ages’ but for quite a long ...”

Unpranked Lyre

John Mullan: The Laziness of Thomas Gray, 13 December 2001

Thomas Gray: A Life
by Robert Mack.
Yale, 718 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 300 08499 4Show More

“... Mr Gray’, or some equivalent. By one account, when, near the end of his life, Gray visited St John’s College to meet the son of an acquaintance, ‘every College man took off his cap as he passed, a considerable number having assembled in the quadrangle to see Mr Gray, who was seldom seen.’ Gray managed the difficult feat of becoming admired, even ...”

His Galactic Centrifuge

Edmund Gordon: Ballard’s Enthusiasms, 23 May 2024

Selected Non-Fiction: 1962-2007
by J.G. Ballard, edited by Mark Blacklock.
MIT, 386 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 0 262 04832 3Show More

“... he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former ...”

Emotional Sushi

Ian Sansom: Tony, Nick and Simon, 9 August 2001

One for My Baby
by Tony Parsons.
HarperCollins, 330 pp., £15.99, July 2001, 0 00 226182 0Show More

How to Be Good
by Nick Hornby.
Viking, 256 pp., £16.99, May 2001, 0 670 88823 0Show More

Little Green Man
by Simon Armitage.
Viking, 246 pp., £12.99, August 2001, 0 670 89442 7Show More

“... hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the ...”

On Thatcher

“... debate alternatives within its framework. It is essential to demythologise ‘Thatcherism’.Tony Blair, 29 October 1987With Mrs Thatcher safely in the lead, that voice and the little scuttling walk threatening to lead us into the next century, Conservative commentators like P. Worsthorne feel it now safe to admit that perhaps there is just a little truth ...”

Alleged War Criminals

Michael Byers: Saddam, Milosevic and Sharon, 22 July 2004

“... However, the delay makes it quite possible that Bush’s sworn enemy will be tried and executed on John Kerry’s watch, and that a Kerry administration will have to deal with the consequences in an already volatile Middle East. Saddam might even be denied the right to choose his legal representives; under existing Iraqi law, only Iraqi, Syrian and Palestinian ...”

It was worse in 1931

Colin Kidd: Clement Attlee, 17 November 2016

Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee
by John Bew.
Riverrun, 668 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 1 78087 989 5Show More

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

A Furtive Night’s Work

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s working habits, 20 October 2005

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 429 pp., £16.99, June 2005, 0 571 21480 0Show More

“... a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II just before the abortive coup, without addressing Blair Worden’s arguments in the LRB of 10 July 2003 that the play in question was not Shakespeare’s at all). Shapiro then glances at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and considers, finally, Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical immortality. This ...”

Out of the Pound Loney

Ronan Bennett: The demonising of Gerry Adams, 5 March 1998

Man of War, Man of Peace? The Unauthorised Biography of Gerry Adams
by David Sharrock and Mark Devenport.
Macmillan, 488 pp., £16.99, November 1997, 0 333 69883 5Show More

“... cruelly short-changed. Many of the graver allegations are familiar, borrowed, for example, from John Ware’s 1983 documentary, The Honourable Member for West Belfast, which relied heavily on the evidence of Peter McMullen, an army deserter who joined the IRA and was at that time fighting extradition from the US (we aren’t told that McMullen later said ...”

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